Example normalized light curve for GRB 050525 across the different Swift filters.

The Swift Ultra-Violet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow catalog greatly expands on the first Swift UVOT GRB afterglow catalog. The second catalog is constructed from a database containing over 120,000 independent UVOT observations of 538 GRBs first detected by Swift, the High Energy Transient Explorer 2 (HETE2), the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL), the Interplanetary Network (IPN), Fermi, and Astro-rivelatore Gamma a Immagini Leggero (AGILE). The catalog covers GRBs discovered from 2005 Jan 17 to 2010 Dec 25. Using photometric information in three UV bands, three optical bands, and a "white" or open filter, the data are optimally co-added to maximize the number of detections and normalized to one band to provide a detailed light curve. The catalog provides positional, temporal, and photometric information for each burst, as well as Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) and X-Ray Telescope (XRT) GRB parameters. Temporal slopes are provided for each UVOT filter. The temporal slope per filter of almost half the GRBs are fit with a single power-law, but one to three breaks are required in the remaining bursts. Morphological comparisons with the X-ray reveal that 75% of the UVOT light curves are similar to one of the four morphologies identified by Evans et al. (2009). The remaining 25% have a newly identified morphology. For many bursts, redshift and extinction corrected UV/optical spectral slopes are also provided at 2x10^3, 2x10^4, and 2x10^5 seconds.

There are four different catalogs in FITS format. They are summarized in the table below, and are available for direct download. In addition, an interative table is made available for the "grb-cat.fits" file and the most interesting columns. The FITS catalog files contain many columns, which are described in the FITS headers. Example IDL and Python scripts are provided below to show how to read in a FITS file and print out the header content to find out what the various columns are.

In addition to the direct download links above, we provide an interactive table based on the "hlsp_uvotgrb_swift_uvot_all_multi_v1_grb-cat.fits" file. You can use the interactive table to filter and sort the larger catalog if you don't want to download and open the entire FITS file right away.

All columns are sortable, just click on the header cells. You can also sort after filtering for subsets of rows using the text boxes under each column.

Both string and numerical columns can be filtered. For example, enter "> 20 && < 23" in the First Mag text box, and "=V" in the Peak Filter text box, to filter on all columns that had initial magnitudes between those values and ultimately peaked in V band. You can enter "UV*" to filter those that peaked in one of the UV filters, as another example.